We Warn and Warn and Warn. The Pimps Ignore. Now, the Pimps Pay!

We’ve warned and received derision and dismissal in response. We’ve argued and received denouncements and sardonic denials. Our claims were decried and characterized as far right paranoid fantasy. We’ve been told that our observation of what happens with Big Gov are delusional scare tactics and are meant to instill a Mad Max world type fear on the “gullible” listener or reader. And that its baseless and irresponsible for us to continue to disseminate our ideas.

However, the irresponsibility is not the arguing for these ideas but the close minded instant refutation of the ideas based on who is making the argument and ignoring the argument itself.

Conservatives and liberty lovers have made such arguments in many areas that have simply been dismissed or ignored. My particular niche usually focuses on the explosion of debt, lack of morality, and government gigantism and their consequences (i.e., societal decay). One of the manifestations of those things was the passage of Obamacare. I touched on that wretched piece of legislation several times, but the one that I’d like to mention here was in a blog entitled, “Palin for HHS Secretary”.

In that blog I argued that surrendering liberty to the caprice of a temporary politician and administrator may sound good if you agree with the politician in charge, but may sound like fingernails on a chalkboard if you don’t. For example, lefties and Democrats love O’s Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and love the idea that in the Obamacare law there are, “1,051 ‘Secretary shall,’ 371 ‘Secretary may,’ and 222 ‘Secretary determine'” and that those vagaries place us at the whim and discretion of Secretary Sebelius. They not only have no problem with that. That’s the core of the, “big government, good” ideology; the administrative state must have someone to determine the plan for the rest of us.

It doesn’t, or hasn’t yet, dawned on many of those supporters that they might have an entirely different visceral reaction when all of that legal discretion is placed at the whim of someone that they really, really dislike and consider to be a “dumb t***”, say, a Health and Human Services Secretary Sarah Palin for example. Can you imagine that? The Democrats and the left would throw hissy fits and tantrums like Janeane Garofalo berating a man holding the door open for her, or like when Michael Moore discovered there will be no more Twinkies; or like Piers Morgan sulking in his pink dressing room backstage just after he lost yet another gun control debate.

That ideology is simply pathetically myopic, and when that’s pointed out, it’s often ignored. Well the Obamacare fallout is starting to prove to many in strikingly vivid ways that the warnings should have been heeded. This morning, I read a great, delightfully re-assuring piece on the karmic fisting being had on some of the pimps for Obamacare. I excerpted bits below and encourage you to read the whole piece.

When I began writing about the menace of increased federal involvement in our medical delivery system, I was surprised to discover that some doctors actually supported it….

Among them was an ER physician who writes under the nom de plume “Shadowfax.” This particular “docblogger” stands out in my memory because he was peculiarly uninformed about the nuances of the issue and yet utterly dismissive of anyone, including other physicians, who attempted to make him understand that he would one day regret advocating an increased government role in medicine. I occasionally crossed swords with him myself, but it was an exercise in futility. Like most soi disant progressives, this self-satisfied sawbones couldn’t imagine that he might be on the wrong side of this or any other issue.

This unshakable belief in his own infallibility regarding government-administered health care was partly due to his hopelessly naïve view of Medicare, which he called “the most successful government program ever.”

…

I haven’t read his blog for a while, but it would appear that the virtues of government-run health care have begun to pall for the good doctor. He has finally discovered what I and others told him years ago: Medicare rules are, as he apparently now realizes, “arbitrary and disconnected from reality.” He has also noticed that, when a physician runs afoul of these bureaucratic vagaries, the government is the judge, jury, and executioner. The immediate cause of his disillusionment is Medicare’s trick of performing a superficial audit of a doctor’s billing practices and, based on a hopelessly flawed statistical sampling method, accuses him of fraud.

Shadowfax querulously explains: “You get a letter from the Medicare … telling you that you’ve been reviewed, found guilty of upcoding, and this finding, based on a handful of charts, is extrapolated back several years.” The term “upcoding” is industry jargon indicating that a provider has submitted a claim using codes that produce inappropriately high payment. It’s rarely done deliberately, assuming it has actually occurred, but that doesn’t matter. “The result is a large demand for reparations, usually in the mid-to-high six figures. The physician group can either write a check or lawyer up and argue it chart by chart.”

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I’m a software guy with a penchant for football, hockey, music, current events and politics -- mostly current events and politics. Having driven several conversations to silence while discussing the latter items, it has been intimated that I should blog about it; to purge it from my system so that we may return to enjoying social events and cocktail parties. Kind of like drawing venom from a snakebite so that the body may return to health. The body, in this clumsy metaphor, is the social life of my wife:0) So, game on! I’ve got opinions and I hope to persuade and look forward, in return, to be persuaded.

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